Although Microsoft Excel supports some charting, sometimes you need more flexible and powerful visualization and need to export data from existing spreadsheets into Python for further use.
A common approach to importing data from Excel files is to export data from Excel into CSV-formatted files and use the tools described in the previous recipe to import data using Python from the CSV file. This is a fairly easy process if we have one or two files (and have Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice.org installed), but if we are automating a data pipe for many files (as part of an ongoing data processing effort), we are not in a position to manually convert every Excel file into CSV. So, we need a way to read any Excel file.
Python has decent support for reading and writing Excel files through the project www.python-excel.org. This support is available in the form of different modules for reading and writing and is platform-independent; in other words, we don't...